All Chapters of Blood of the forgotten moon: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

“Oryn said yes,” Thea announced, appearing in my doorway with her coat already on. “Eventually. After significant negotiation on my part.” I looked up from the book I was actually reading this time. “What did you negotiate?” “I promised we’d be back before dark, that I’d keep my phone on, and that I would not under any circumstances take you anywhere with a population of more than two thousand people.” She held up her keys. “There’s a town forty minutes out. Population eighteen hundred. I counted.” She tilted her head. “Come on. You’ve been inside this estate for weeks. You need coffee that didn’t come from our kitchen.” I looked at her for a moment. Then I got my coat. Oryn was in the entrance hall when we came downstairs. He looked at Thea. Then at me. Then at Thea again with the expression of a man who had agreed to something and was already regretting the specific terms of the agreement. “Before dark,” he said. “You already said that,” Thea told him cheerfully.

“The eastern pack originally settled this territory because of the river,” Riven said, “and spent the next forty years arguing about who owned which bank.” “Who won?” I asked. “Nobody. They eventually merged out of exhaustion.” I almost smiled. “That’s the least heroic founding story I’ve ever heard.” “Most of them are, if you look closely enough.” Across the table, Thea caught my eye. She had the expression of someone watching something they’d been waiting for and trying very hard not to make it obvious that they were watching it. She was failing at the not-making-it-obvious part. When Brennan pushed back his chair and excused himself and the last two remaining wolves followed a few minutes later, she gathered her things with a speed that was slightly too efficient for someone who hadn’t been waiting for exactly this moment. She paused behind my chair on her way out. “Goodnight,” she said, to the room in general. Then she looked at me. The look said approximately seven thi

“Beta Ardenne has arrived,” Oryn said from the doorway. “He’s in the east receiving room.” “Thank you,” I said. I set down the book I hadn’t been reading for the past forty minutes, smoothed my sleeve over my wrist, and stood up. In the mirror across the room, I looked the same as I always did. Same face. Same posture. Same eyes that gave nothing away unless I decided to let them. Good. I walked to the door and then I stopped and I stood there for exactly three seconds and I breathed and I thought about what I’d told Riven last night and what he’d said back and I picked that up and I carried it with me out the door. I was not going to fall apart. He was older. That was the first thing I noticed when I walked into the east receiving room and saw my father standing near the window with his hands clasped in front of him. Four months since I’d last seen him and he looked like a year had passed instead. Thinner through the face. Something worn around his eyes that hadn’t been

“Your mother wrote a letter,” Riven said. “Before she died. I need to tell you what it says.” I looked at him across the library table. “All right,” I said. He told me. He didn’t soften it. Didn’t build to it with careful framing or political language or the kind of measured delivery that was really just a way of managing how much impact something was allowed to have when it landed. He sat across from me and told me plainly and completely, holding eye contact throughout, which I understood was a deliberate choice. The choice of someone who believed that the truth deserved to be delivered to the person it belonged to without flinching. My mother had written a letter before the ceremony. She had given it to a packmate named Seri with instructions to deliver it to my father afterward. Seri had found my father two days after the fire. He had read it. He had kept it for six years in his inner coat and done nothing with it until today when he had walked into a receiving room in Sove

“Start from the beginning,” I said. “All of it.” He sat in the chair across from me and he did. He told me about the awakening window first. The celestial alignment. The forty-year cycle. What it meant for a seal that had been degrading for six weeks on top of twenty years of accumulated pressure. He told me it wasn’t going to be a gradual surface. He told me the seal would break completely, all at once, and that meant everything behind it would come through at the same time. I listened without interrupting. He told me what an awakening involved. The physical reality of it, not the sanitized version, the actual version. The pain of a long-term suppression releasing. The body encountering something it had been built around the absence of and having to reorganize itself in real time. He told me it would be significant and then he told me what significant meant in specific terms because I’d asked him once to always tell me what things meant in specific terms and he’d remembered tha